For Christ's Sake

A yuletide toast! Lift the brimming beaker to that much maligned and badly misunderstood figure in Christmas lore, Ebenezer Scrooge. A heavy too long in hearthside morality tales, Ebenezer deserves an immediate rehabilitation, if only for one reason: His classic two-word description of Christmas is so elegant, so succinct and so true that saying anything more seems almost redundant. "Christmas? Bah, humbug!" As another Santa season closes, my deepest impulse is to echo his eloquent sentiment, adding only a W. C. Fieldsian cane swat at the nearest beaming Tiny Tim.

Christmas is humbug in the precise dictionary sense; i.e., "a fraud or imposition, sham, trickery, deception or swindle." Christmas is all these things and more. Oh, I'm there are some good things about it. The whole season exudes funny magic that gets to almost everyone in some way. But this happens despite what we've (continued on page 122) For Christ's Sake (continued from page 117) done to Christmas, not because of it. Who is responsible for ruining Christmas?

Religious people, of course, have an instant, pop-up answer to that question. Christmas was ruined by its "commercialization." By now, this argument is very familiar. Once upon a time, Christmas was a pure religious occasion, undefiled by hucksters, admen and sales campaigns. Then came the spoilers. Like King Herod's villainous soldiers, the scions of commerce debauched everything. Driving the Christ child out of his manger, the greedy money-changers warped Christmas into a superheated buying orgy. They dragooned people into stores, bludgeoned them into buying things they didn't need, drowned out the angel songs with shrill sales pitches and completely took over a day intended solely for prayer and almsgiving.

This account is also humbug. In the first place, as James Forman has so rightly and dramatically reminded us, the churches themselves are among the biggest hucksters in the land. Ecclesiastical assets run into the tens of billions of dollars--in buildings, land, business and gilt-edged stocks. For churches to accuse someone else of commercialism presents a classic example of the mote in the beam remover's eye. Second, the stale yarn of the Christian goodies and the pagan baddies bears so little resemblance to the real history of Christmas it is surprising it has lasted as long as it has. The truth is that the last week in December, the winter solstice, was a pagan festival time before Christ was born, long before Christians decided to use it to celebrate Christ's birth. For most of Christian history, Christmas was a minor holiday: and for a while, after the Reformation, it was not celebrated at all in Scotland and the New England Colonies. The Plymouth Pilgrims sternly trudged to work on December 25 to demonstrate their freedom from popish superstition. Ever since it really achieved popularity, in medieval Europe and 19th Century America, Christmas has been a mishmash of disparate ingredients: raucous feasting, churchgoing, wassailing, revelry, hymn singing and saturnalia. It has never been the pristine religious holy day the preachers claim it was. True, many people feel more religious on Christmas Day than they usually do. But it is also the day on which there occur more murders, suicides, personal assaults and psychotic breakdowns than on any other. Christmas has always been a glorious admixture of religion, paganism, hucksterism and conviviality. That is not what's wrong with it. If it were purely a religious occasion, it would probably be worse.

No. The blame for despoiling Christmas lies not with the hucksters, however boorish they may be. Christmas was messed up before they ever got hold of it. It was ruined not by the cannibals but by the Christians. It is the churches that must accept the main responsibility for the truth of Scrooge's apt epithet. The churches are the main culprits in the ruination of Christmas. By the churches, I do not mean the ordinary churchgoers; I mean the people who have led, or misled, organized Christianity during its two-millennium-long career. The very fact that Christianity has even survived is something of a miracle, in view of the way ecclesiastics have abused, distorted, twisted and diluted the story of Jesus for 2000 years. Only the persistent power of his personality, which still has a strange attraction for us after all these years of obfuscation, has prevented Christianity from following Zoroastrianism and Shinto into the oblivion reserved for religions that have nothing to say to their cultures.

The fraud, sham and swindle the prelates have made out of Christmas is, I submit, only a symptom of the mockery they have made out of Christianity as a whole. I'm not saying every religious leader in the nearly 2000 years since Christ's birth is culpable. Nor am I claiming that the churches alone are to blame for reducing the birthday of Jesus to its present miserable state. What I am saying is that Christians bear the main brunt of the responsibility and, since I am a sort of Christian myself, I think we should be honest about it and not put the finger on someone else.

How have the churches mutilated Christianity and, in the process, reduced Christmas to humbug? In a number of ways:

1. They have tried to make the story of Jesus over into a legend about an eviscerated, bloodless ascetic and Christianity itself into a dreary life-denying philosophy of flesh-despising abstemiousness. Admittedly, this has often been a little hard to manage, in view of the Biblical portrait of Jesus. On at least two occasions, the Gospels report that his enemies rejected Jesus because he had no interest in fasting and was "a glutton and a winebibber." He frequented parties, kept company with notoriously shady characters and supplied some booze when an embarrassed wedding-reception host found he was running low. I wonder who drew those countless pictures distributed by churches and Sunday schools of a pale, effete Jesus? Those pictures have done more to destroy Jesus than 100 of Herod's legions.

Someday, theologians may even have the courage to speculate openly on an aspect of Jesus' life that, until now, has remained strictly sub rosa: his relationship to women. If Jesus was fully man as well as fully God (which is orthodox Christian doctrine), then how did Jesus the man relate to women? As far as I know, only one contemporary theologian, Tom Driver of Union Theological Seminary, has ever risked writing an article on this delicate, if not taboo, subject. The speculation has been left to writers such as D. H. Lawrence and playwrights such as the contemporary Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode. Lawrence, in his story The Man Who Died, equates the Resurrection with the awakening in Jesus of sensual desire. This loads entirely too much symbolic significance on sex, but it does help somewhat by taking Jesus out of the eunuchs' union. Ghelderode, in his play The Women at the Tomb, has all the women Jesus met during his lifetime--Mary Magdalene, the woman taken in adultery, the woman at the well, Mary and Martha and others--gather in a shack near the site of the Crucifixion and jealously rail at one another about what he had meant to each of them. The sensual aspect of many of these relationships is made quite clear and, furthermore, seems very natural.

Of course, Lawrence and Ghelderode are merely guessing. The Bible itself says nothing about the sexual aspects of Jesus' relationships. But it also says nothing at all about what Jesus did between the ages of 12 and 30. So storytellers rush in where theologians fear to tread. And the spirit of what they say may be closer to the truth than the embarrassed evasions of the theologians. In any case, Jesus explicitly rejected the way of the anchorite or the fakir. He did not flee to the desert with John the Baptist (though he apparently toyed with the idea at one time) nor did he join the puritanical Essenes on the shores of the Dead Sea. Jesus was not an ascetic. And the centuries-old effort of clerics, especially celibate ones, to geld Jesus into a prissy androgyne is one of the reasons Christmas today is a bamboozle. Who wants to celebrate the birthday of a First Century teetotaling Myra Breckinridge?

2. The churches have also helped destroy Christmas by turning Christianity into a petty-rule system and picturing Jesus as a finicky moralizer who spent his life telling people what not to do. This clerical casting of Jesus as a harried cubmaster is an even worse violation of the record than dressing him in the hair shirt of an ascetic. Jesus came into a world in some ways like ours, where, for most people, religion had been reduced to a set of rigid rules to worry about and a bag of ritual flip-flops to break open when you transgressed them. Jesus himself spent his life breaking most of those taboos--violating the Sabbath, rapping with "impure" men and women, wandering around with no visible means of support, sharply ridiculing the righteous prudes of the day. When people did come to him with moral dilemmas, he invariably tossed the questions back at them at (continued on page 238) For Christ's Sake(continued from page 122) a deeper level. Whether he was confronted by what some considered to be theft, adultery, tax evasion or whatever, he consistently refused to play the rulebook game. That is just what riled so many people. He made them look within and decide for themselves. And that's scary.

This is not to say that Jesus had no interest in the great ethical issues of life. He certainly did. But there is a difference between genuine morality and petty moralism. Jesus was concerned about the folly of looking for real satisfaction in obsessively accumulating wealth. He fought ethnic hatred, religious snobbery, intellectual pretense and every form of cultural hauteur. But a purveyor of rules he was not. How, then, have the priests made him into one?

Simple. Most people don't like to assume the responsibility of making ethical decisions for themselves. They long desperately for someone, anyone, to do it for them: a shrink, a professor, Ann Landers. Jesus refused. He was crucified. But the churches have gladly obliged. So instead of a feast of freedom and a time for celebrating the gift of choice, the churches have turned Christmas into one more doleful reminder of how grievously we have all wandered astray and how badly we need to be set back on the straight path. Perhaps the most appropriate way to mark the birthday of Christ, in his spirit, would be to pick out a particularly offensive cultural taboo (not a sexual one; that's too easy) and celebrate Christmas by transgressing it. Maybe that would mean taking a streetwalker to midnight mass or burning money on the steps of the First National Bank. Whatever it is, transgression is good for the soul. And it also might lower the humbug level of Christmas, if only by a cubit.

3. The ecclesiastical powers have also made Christmas into a flimflam by deradicalizing Jesus. This is their most astonishing example of prestidigitation. After all, this man was executed by the Roman authorities (no, Lenny, your people didn't do it; we goyim did) because they considered him to be a political threat. No imperial power wastes nails, boards and soldiers' time crucifying contemplatives or harmless spiritual mystics. Jesus was neither. In fact, recent research by Professor S. G. F. Brandon, an English New Testament scholar, suggests that he was probably much closer to the Zealots (the Viet Cong of occupied Palestine) than has previously been thought, or at least admitted. That question remains an open one. In any case, the life and message of Jesus is ill suited as material for an establishment ideology. But the elders are truly wise, and also inventive. The real miracle of transubstantiation is not that the Church turns wine into blood but that it has transformed Jesus into a cosmic Tory. The song Jesus' mother sings after she conceives him calls for "casting down the mighty from their thrones" and "sending the rich away empty." Jesus himself announced that his mission was one of liberating the captives. He lampooned the rich, scorned those in power and defied imperial authority. He cast his lot with the outs, the riffraff and the misfits, the Palestinian equivalent of hippies, street people and untouchables. He died the death reserved for those found guilty of insurrection. On the whole, an unlikely candidate for the Union League Club.

Christmas is a swindle because the churches have taken a Jesus who was the hope of beleaguered underdogs and made him the keystone of the status quo. Although an occasional Christian today catches a glimpse of the revolutionary portent of Jesus, the churches usually do all they can to discourage such impiety. Camilo Torres, the guerrilla priest of Colombia, and Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of the Mozambique National Liberation Front, both modern Christian rebels, are dead now, the victims of political assassination. But before they were murdered, they were already being pilloried by their fellow Christians for not showing patience under tribulation. You rarely see their pictures in churches or read about them in religious magazines.

The con game continues. And until the churches forgo their hard-won seats in the halls of the establishment and loose the radical potential in Christianity, the vast majority of the world's restive and enraged poor will rightly continue to see Christmas not only as humbug but as a fir-scented opiate for the masses who are less and less willing to be drugged.

So there you have it. Christmas is a shell and the blame lies, for the most part, on those of us who call ourselves Christians. Why has it happened? Every religion has at least two sides, and Christianity is no exception. The figure of Christ has inspired Mozart's Requiem Mass, John Hus's rebellion, Giotto's paintings and an endless succession of great men. Christianity has also been used as a knout for social control, a whip to punish and impoverish. There seem to be two Christs locked in combat. The clerical Christ, the one defined by ecclesiastical authority, is usually, though not always, the oppressive one. On the other hand, the most moving and authentic depictions of Christ often come from those on the edge or completely outside ecclesiastical Christianity. Thus, in our time, the most original filmic portrayal of Christ was made by an Italian Marxist and atheist, Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Gospel According to St. Matthew). The most vigorous modern retelling of Christ's life was written by Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ). But Kazantzakis was relentlessly attacked by the authorities of the Greek Orthodox Church and, when he died, was refused Christian burial. The reason Christmas is humbug is that the churches are jealous and anxious. They want a monopoly on the portrayal of Christ and the definition of his significance. But they no longer have it, and that is all to the good. Jesus in not the churches' property. Christmas will continue to be humbug until the churches realize that fact and loose their death grip on him.

So why can't we just do without Christmas completely? Get rid of the whole bag? It's been tried--not only by the New England Puritans I mentioned earlier but in some Communist countries. But Christmas, humbug and all, keeps creeping back. Maybe it happens because man is an incurable celebrator and also an incorrigible dreamer; and Christmas, for all its sham and fakery, grabs him at these two vital points.

In industrial societies, we tend to repress man's festive and imaginative faculties, maybe because they make man less suitable for the assembly line. Religions scholars have reinforced this distortion. While I was doing the research for my new book, The Feast of Fools, I noticed that American theologians, especially the Protestant ones, had written almost nothing on festivity. They have been so obsessed with the moral and intellectual facets of religion that they have made us forget that religion began in feasts, mime and chant. My own research has convinced me that all our American religions are deeply infected with the moralistic and anti-festive qualities of industrial society. The truth is that in religion, dance precedes dogma; saturnalia comes before sermon. Man is festive. He thrives on parties, fiestas, holidays, breaks in his routine, times for toasting, singing the old songs, remembering and hoping. Animals play or gambol; men celebrate. Also, man is a fantasizer. He keeps on dreaming of a world free of napalm and cancer and hunger, despite centuries of frustration. He won't stop hoping. The central symbols of Christmas, both pagan and Christian, speak to that unquenchable hope. So Christmas fuses Homo sapiens' tendencies to celebrate and to hope. If it were abolished, we would have to invent something else to take its place.

Well, then, couldn't this something else be something without the veneer of religious symbols? Maybe. But I doubt it. I used to believe, and even hope, that mankind might someday outgrow its religious phase and live maturely in the calm, cool light of reason. But people have been predicting the end of religion and the death of God for centuries. And I no longer seriously believe it will happen, nor do I hope it will.

Why? First, because, with a few exceptions, I am not very impressed with the level of imagination, compassion or human vitality of the people I know who claim they have left religion behind. They usually either retain some set of beliefs they are unwilling to criticize or even admit they have or they are people who seem incapable not only of faith but of any strong emotion. If you have to become an emotional cretin to kick religion, the price is too high. Second, just as we had gotten comfortable with the idea that religion was disappearing--on the campuses, for example--it came back in a swirl of swamis, gurus, chants, mantras, tarot cards and I Ching. The incense business was never better. This current revival of often bizarre religious practices may be a muted scream of protest against the calibrated conformity of industrial society; or it may be a desperate search for a sense of belonging (which definitely seems to be the case, for example, with the new communes and the Krishna Consciousness Movement); or it may be a simple quest for God. Whatever it is, it suggests to me that man is more essentially religious than many of us have assumed. He thirsts for mystery, meaning, community and even for some sort of ritual. Granted, his future religious development may assume very unorthodox, even weird, forms. But religion, Comte and Marx to the contrary, will probably not just wither away.

Neither can clerical Christianity, as it now exists, become the religion of the future. In fact, it is already slipping into the past. Christianity will find a place in the religious future of mankind only if it undergoes a reformation so fundamental and so far-reaching it will make the religious upheaval of the 16th Century seem like a monk's squabble. Even then, Christianity can never again be the single focus of faith, as it was (for Western man, at least) for nearly 1000 years. It will have to make its contribution along with the other great religious traditions of the world and along with the new symbols and rites that are bound to emerge in the future. And the contribution Christianity will bring to this emergent pluralistic faith will have to do with the man whose unknown birthday we mark on December 25 but whose story has been so grossly perverted by generations of anxious prelates and Grand or not-so-Grand Inquisitors that today we scarcely recognize him.

So I lift my flagon to old Ebenezer. He tells it like it is. But as I drink. I secretly have another toast in mind, too. a toast to Christmas. Not the humbug Christmas we Christians have foisted on the world, admittedly with a little help from our friends at Gimbels and Saks. No, I drink to Christmas as it may someday be: a fiesta when we celebrate earth and flesh and, in the midst of all our hang-ups and tyrannies, remind ourselves that at least once one guy lived a reckless, ecstatic and fully free life every day--and that maybe someday we all can.